Christian Joyce returns to Montreal a veteran of the Cuban Revolution. He survived but left warm, passionate Esameralda in a convent and has lost Renée again to her New York lover, Ramon, the Castro impersonator. Surviving Well: Montreal 1960 is Book Two of the Christian James Joyce Series. Christian is home after a long journey from the Gulf Coast where he searched the bayous in vain for his dangerous friend Maartyn. It is hot, dirty and densely humid in Montreal and he is broke and alone; his estranged family dispersed. A common vagrant, adrift in the cosmopolitan city he once understood, where the atmosphere and the politics have changed. He survived the bloody Cuban Revolution with a new understanding of violence but in Québec there is more unrest as impatient young Québeçois meet in dark, smoke-filled rooms watching a world in turmoil, aching to become part of the new order forming on college campuses and street corners. Heated rhetoric fuels resentment against their English and Scotish overlords. They want action and leadership. A hero to the young radicals, Christian is lured into the vortex of the fledgling FLQ as the Political Provo and is once again confronted by a cadre of odd and dangerous characters who are seldom what they pretend to be. Christian has become less naïve and more angular since Cuba but the long journey home by train, aged by experience and life lived hard on the margins, have taken their measure. The Quiet Revolution that would ease Québec away from it's rural Catholic heritage is taking place in board rooms of the business elite but on the mean streets there is an undercurrent of anarchy and Christian is about to come face to face with the social upheaval of the 1960's and the fragmented movements that lead inevitably to chaos. He experienced enough chaos and bloodshed in Cuba and now he wants only to be near the cooling waters of the St. Lawrence River, find some peace, rediscover his music and continue his recovery from drugs while he waits for Renée to satisfy her Bohemian cravings. But he is about to meet Breeze, the beautiful cello player with the Outport heritage, who will change his life. In the meantime there is a body lying close to the edge of the broken concrete bulkhead, in danger of rolling into the boiling river. A slight young man, dark and handsome, and dead too young; like Rosa and the young rebels. He remembers all the bodies, the friends and enemies, the young and the old. What does this one mean to his future? He should just walk away...
About the Author: Patric Ryan was born to write and paint about ships and oceans, raised in Southwestern Ontario, near and in the water but far from the ocean. How he and his mate got to the ocean is a story in itself. Patric has a rich experience of life on the water, from Captain of a steamboat on the Muskokas to commercial diving and fish tugs on Lake Huron and Georgian Bay. In 1980 he and the crew of a fishing tug out of Tobermory Ontario rescued the crew of a sinking Newfoundland freighter. For the rescue the crew received the Governor General's Medal of Bravery and a subsequent journey to Newfoundland to buy a fishing schooner opened the flood gates of stories and art work that has been Patric's full time obsession ever since. Patric and his wife Dorie spent six months in Newfoundland rebuilding the old schooner and making friends. The memoir called 'Closing the Newfoundland Circles' tells the story of how Patric and Dorie met, their young lives and influences and their adventure travelling to Newfoundland, rebuilding a classic fishing schooner and returning across the storm tossed Gulf of St. Lawrence and the voyage up the St. Lawrence Seaway to Georgian Bay. The old schooner was rebuilt and rigged, Dorie made the sails, and then sold to a fisherman in Alaska as the couple began their family; two beautiful girls and a lifetime of art and literature, building boats and houses and reliving the Newfoundland treasures of stories and friends in several novels and hundreds of paintings. Look for the Fogo's War Trilogy and the Surviving Well Series online and at Independent Book Stores.